Faraway Shakespeares : performing the absence

My paper focuses on two recent productions of Romeo and Juliet that turn to video and Skype technology to fragment and infract the dramatic text and the characters’ bodies, as well as to create “virtual spaces.” In both cases the actors cannot be onstage together because they are either entrapped in the bombed-out city of Homs, Syria, or locked in a juvenile prison in Milan, Italy, and are therefore replaced by their virtual avatars. In March 2015, Syrian playwright, actor and director Nawar Bulbul premiered his version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with a cast of more than 100 children in the vast Za’atari refugee camp near the Syrian border. For three months he worked daily with children at the “Souriyat Accross Borders” center in Amman, Jordan, a rehabilitation hospice for Syrian refugees, where he imagined Romeo to be living. He also worked daily, via Skype, with Juliet and the group in the besieged city of Homs and with their drama teacher, who carried on with rehearsals even when an internet connection was impossible. The play was projected through Skype from Zaatari and Homs onto a screen in the theater in Amman so that the two groups virtually met via the Internet. On 1 December 2018, Giuseppe Scutellà, actor and director of Puntozero Teatro, a small theatre company working with young offenders at Milan’s juvenile detention institute “Cesare Beccaria” presented an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo was put on trial for the murder of Tybalt, simulating the procedure of a real life trial of a young man accused of murder in 2018. The head of the prison did not allow the young offenders to take part in the performance that took place in the prison’s 200-seats theatre and was also open to the general public, so that their parts had to be screened during the live performance. My paper addresses the negotiation between the physicality and materiality of performance and the immateriality of its virtual replica, between the contingency of a precise location and the globality of the video/web dis-location. It aims not only to investigate the representational challenges created by modes of experimentation with narratives and interactivity, but also to question their ethical consequences as well as their role in process of negotiation between Shakespeare and marginal groups.